Matt McCarten: Labour's been dreadful over Field and voters have finally noticed

Long-time political players know it takes a couple of months before public anger with a party's actions starts registering in opinion polls. It seems voters take time to mull over their unease about their preferred party before they desert it.

This week the increasing public disquiet about whether Labour had ripped off the taxpayer to pay for its election campaign or whether Taito Phillip Field was taking bribes for doing his job came home with a jolt.

Until this week, opinion polls showed Labour and National support still tracking neck and neck. This emboldened Helen Clark to scoff at the furore in Parliament over the pledge card and the Field affair. But she went too far when she dismissed the matters as of interest only to the political chattering classes inside the Wellington "beltway".

This seemingly arrogant dismissal went down like a lead balloon. You could feel the masses outside the beltway suddenly raise their heads to see what it was that supposedly didn't concern them. It is now obvious that they do care. Something went clunk.

The Herald-DigiPoll trumpeted the people's verdict on the front page of Thursday's Herald. The verdict is in. National has soared to a 7.7 percentage point lead in the poll. Labour is in big trouble. And it's all self-inflicted. Voters can live with mistakes when a party admits them. Providing it tries to put things right, people are forgiving.

It's the fudging by the Prime Minister that is Labour's undoing. When the Electoral Commission, the Auditor-General and the Solicitor-General are all saying you have had your hand in the public purse to pay for your last election you don't attack them and dismiss their findings out of hand. And you certainly don't hint that if they do happen to be right you'll just change the law and make it retrospective to enable you to get away with your misdemeanour.

A better strategy surely would have been a puzzled but respectful stance on the part of the PM, with measured comments about how all the parliamentary parties had traditionally understood this action was appropriate. Then something along the lines that Parliament would revamp the rules so that in future they were more transparent. They probably would have got away with it as all the other parties had been doing the same thing for years. The only exception was the Maori Party which had misspent $50, which it paid back.

The Nats will have been very relieved to be caught misusing only $10,000 of taxpayers' money. They were able to pay it back and opportunistically get themselves on the moral high ground. They wouldn't have been quite so ready to pay it back if it had been $100,000, of course.

It's amusing to see the defence of Labour's behaviour by the saintly promoter of parliamentary ethics, Peter Dunne. That's easily explained when we see full-page advertisements for United Future in newspapers paid for by parliamentary funds.

NZ First is keeping its head down, hoping we don't find out many of its "Winston on the Beach" billboards were funded by Parliament.

Jeanette Fitzsimons' spurious claim that if the Auditor-General is right MPs could print only their calling cards is just spin. And what about the great perk-buster Rodney Hide? Not a peep. That's because, as all the insiders know, Act has always been the best at finding ways to use its parliamentary budget for its campaigns. Labour must be furious to be the party taking the heat when they have all been at it.

It must be particularly galling for Labour that it will probably have to pay back the $446,000 for the pledge card. According to the Herald-DigiPoll, even three-quarters of Labour supporters say they should pay it back.

National must be ecstatic at Labour's own goal. There is possibly some truth to Don Brash's claim that if it wasn't for Labour's creative use of parliamentary funds National could now be the Government. If that had happened this would mean the current bunch of Cabinet ministers would be on backbench salaries instead of the fabulous incomes they are enjoying. The only politically sensible way to pay it off is to force all the Cabinet ministers to shell out $20,000 each and pay it off. Call it restorative justice.

The Field fiasco has created the perception that Clark will put up with the dodgy doings of an MP if it's politically expedient. To be fair, it's hard to see what she could have done differently. But the constraint she placed on the Ingram inquiry into the allegations around her Mangere MP has now put her in a worse position. The Ingram inquiry didn't have enough evidence to prove Field had done anything wrong but did suggest there was something rotten.

How Labour's minders allowed Field to try to spin that he was exonerated was clumsy. Clark's spin afterwards looked dreadful. She probably had no choice at that point to bluff her way through it and hope the public would lose interest. It clearly hasn't. National clearly thinks it's on an electoral winner when it is calling the Labour Party corrupt. No one believes that, of course. But the odour around the actions to bluff it out has hit Labour hard in the polls.

I was speaking to a senior National Party strategist a couple of weeks ago who was despairing that Labour seemed indestructible. Not any more. Labour can come out of this but Clark needs to learn to admit mistakes and trust Labour's supporters to forgive them.

Trying to spin that they have done nothing wrong is the real problem.